At present salvaging wornout cases of auto- and tractor air-core tires with metal cord is a serious technical and ecological problem, because the existing technologies of their processing are uneconomic due to much material and power consumption.
One prior-art method for shredding wornout tire cases is known to use their mechanical shredding with the aid of a shredder unit having two shafts rotating against each other and carrying disks and toothed sleeves (SU, A1, 633,601).
However, said method suffers from high power consumption, involves use of sophisticated bulky equipment, and necessitates periodical outages of the technological process for replacing quickly wearing-out knife blades, especially when used for processing metal-cord cases.
One more method for shredding wornout metal-cord-reinforced tire cases is known to comprise cooling the cases down to the state of embrittlement, followed by their mechanical breaking and crushing, using a device having two disintegrators appearing as a die and a punch.
However, said method and disintegrator unit require also much power to be consumed, which is due to a necessity for producing and using a considerable amount of liquid nitrogen.
Known in the art presently is a method for destroying articles made from composites and rubber-like materials, in particular, wornout tire cases, said method comprising preconditioning the cases and their shredding by virtue of an explosion (SU, A1, 1,614,843). However, according to the method, the cases are shredded into large pieces and therefore need further disintegration, using other techniques. Moreover, the method suffers from low disintegration efficiency and low utilization efficiency of explosion energy.
A device for explosion destruction of wornout tire cases comprises a trough-shaped chamber, and a receptacle for shredded rubber, as well as a unit for fixing the explosive in place (SU, A1, 1,614,843).
However, said device fails to provide an efficient shredding of metal-cord-reinforced tire cases nor does it meet the requirements of safety engineering adopted in blasting operations.